Everyone complained about the weather. For the farmers the summer was too cool and soggy. Tomatoes didn’t ripen. Corn rotted. Melons were watery and bitter. For the miners the coal was damp and tunnels were prone to flood. Construction projects were abandoned. Shoppers stayed at home. Even the birds looked defeated with their soggy nests. The weather forecasters blamed El Niño for the constant rain, but Mom reasoned it was upper tropospheric cold cores causing the weather malaise.“You know what I love about the weather?” she might say to me after staring out the window for a long spell.
“No,” I’d reply. “I really don’t.”
“I find it so fascinating,” she would continue, “that what people can’t control seems to utterly control them. The more they fight it the more they fail. For some people if it is not a bright sunny sky they don’t see any beauty in the sky at all.
When they don’t get what they want, they can’t appreciate what they are given. I don’t trust anyone who wants to control the weather. People want too much power over nature. Don’t you think so?”
I had no argument with nature. Since the time when I was seven years old and the love curse for my mother unfolded inside me, I seemed to be living a life driven by a genetic engine from within. I allowed the curse to guide me in my thoughts and deeds, and as a result I was not conflicted with doubt and uncertainty, as were so many people my age who struggled to become something they were not—struggled to imitate something outside themselves, instead of discovering who they already were.
And then I turned sixteen.
It was a Saturday. The weather cleared for a short spell, and after I had opened some presents my mother and I decided to take a drive through the countryside. She borrowed Ab and Dolph’s rusting Mercedes, and we set out with a picnic lunch and high hopes as the sun shined down on us.
We had been in the car only a few minutes when she said, “I’ve held off telling you everything about me and your origins until your sixteenth birthday. I just want you to know that no matter what you think you know, what you have guessed at, or how you feel now, you are in for a big birthday surprise, and when you get it you will not believe it. You will refuse it, but I swear it is the greatest gift I can give you.”
I reached across the seat and gently rested my hand on her
smooth shoulder, then quietly took a long, slow breath. Touching her was always so vital to me. There was something bountiful in our physical connection, as if my hand against her body was some sort of umbilical cord passing nourishment between us.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m ready.”
I had been waiting for this day for many years and I was prepared. As I grew up I had thought a lot about the nature of questions and answers. Those two words seemed as inseparable as Chang and Eng and were like a set of manacles in my mind. I believed that no person, or emotion, or idea was alone unto itself but was understood only against the contrast of its opposite. An action had no purpose without a reaction. Hope was never so courageous as when pitted against cynicism. Love was made more powerful when hate dissolved into it. Perhaps because I had spent so much time with Ab and Dolph, I had an odd suspicion my mother was going to tell me I had a twin, but it turned out to be a twin of another kind. It was just that my questions were finally paired up face-to-face with the answers.
She drove me out to the old Lutheran church in Carpenter-town. It was called the Rumbaugh Church because from the time that Hermann Rumbaugh had built it after the Civil War the Rumbaughs had privately funded it, and all of them were buried out back.
“This is where I want to be buried,” she said, as we pulled up a narrow driveway toward a modest red-brick building
with a white wooden steeple. We came to a stop and rolled up the windows. The recent moisture had settled into the leather seats, and the air smelled of mildew. I mentioned this. Mom sniffed.
“Smells more like an old coffin,” she declared. There was an edge to her voice. She mashed down on the emergency brake as if she were going to stop the rotation of the earth. We opened and closed the car doors and as silently as cats walked a thin brick path to the back of the church. The quiet between us was filled with the arbitrary sounds of nature, but there was nothing arbitrary within us.
She had a key borrowed from the Twins, and we entered through the back, walked around to the front of the altar, and continued down the short central aisle until we took a seat in the last oak pew. I set the picnic basket between us.
“When you are from a small town,” she said in a church whisper, “you realize that it is the small details in life that add up to something extraordinary. And now that you have turned sixteen, I’ll give you all the details and you can add them up for yourself and find where you stand in all of this. But you won’t understand a thing about this mother love curse until you understand the Rumbaughs, so I’ll start with them.”
“Does this have to do with my father?” I asked testily, because I still had no interest in him.
She held up a finger to silence me. “Look,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this day for many years, and I have mapped out what I want to say, so just bear with me. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and sat back. From working in the courthouse she told me a lot of stories, and it always seemed her effort to tell them had to be matched by my effort to remember them, and to remember them was a way of preserving her within me.
Then she told me what she knew of the Rumbaugh history, and the more I heard the more I understood—not just about who I was but where I was going, and why.
The Rumbaughs arrived in western Pennsylvania from Germany in the early 1800s, she began. Some said the first Rumbaughs came even earlier, as Hessian troops hired by the British during the Revolutionary War and stationed in Trenton, New Jersey. After Washington crossed the Delaware and routed the enemy, a Rumbaugh was reported to have slipped away into the woods, heading west with a native woman twice his age. I doubt there’s any proof of that, but knowing what I do about the love curse, I rather doubt a Rumbaugh would have come to the colonies and left his mother behind.
The first Rumbaughs that Mom could trace within the United States were field and feed farmers in the early 1800s, but they soon branched out. By the Civil War one of them, Hermann Rumbaugh, was making a lot of money through charging families who had lost loved ones in battle a fee to return their bodies. It seems many Union soldiers had taken out life insurance policies, and their families could receive the death benefit from the insurance company only upon proof of
death. Their bodies were often pieced together from disparate parts stuffed into intact uniforms, but it was the face that was significant for identification. The insurance companies needed to see the body—the face to be exact—as fingerprinting was not yet invented and identity documents were often forged to claim a false death benefit while allowing the soldier to desert.
Embalming, back then, was the new “body preservation science.” A company called the Egyptian Chemical Co. sold the necessary fluids, and Hermann used a portable battlefield hand pump to pump the embalming fluid into a main artery, which then forced the remaining blood out an existing wound or a slit he provided in another artery. Then he’d cart or rail-transport the bodies back from the battlefield to be identified, and payment would be sent to his mother, naturally.
“Pardon me for saying so,” my mother said sheepishly, “but Hermann made a killing.” She told me he had teams of freed slaves working the battlefields for him. Hermann kept lists of all the troops organized into regiments and battle positions so he could narrow down where the insured might have fallen. His men would fan out and sort through the casualties, matching insurance policy photographs to faces. Then they’d find intact, presentable uniforms and fill them with whatever extra body parts were needed to compose a respectable corpse and top it off with the proper head, hat, and rankings.
Hermann provided this body retrieval service throughout the Union. It was a lucrative business, and by the time the Battle of Gettysburg was over he had amassed a small fortune.
Mom said family lore has it he claimed to have gotten into a tug-of-war with the Civil War photographer Mathew Brady over bodies that they both wanted—Brady for his staged post-battle photographs and Hermann for his bounty. I laughed at the thought of this—the pushing and shoving and the blood and bits flying—but it was a nervous laughter.
After Gettysburg the Union Army marched south and the killing continued. Hermann further added to his fortune by expanding his business to include Southern families. While watching Union soldiers bury dead Confederates in mass graves, he examined many of the corpses and found identification. He embalmed and iced them, contacted their families through couriers and newspaper ads, and sold them back for a steep price.
By the time the fighting was over, he was exhausted with death. It was said he wanted only to return to his mother, whom he loved and who had managed his money. After the war he built an elaborate Victorian farmhouse for himself, his wife, and his children. On an adjoining piece of property he built a smaller version of the same house for his mother. Beneath the two houses he constructed a tunnel, so he could rush to his mother’s side no matter the time of day or weather.
“I don’t know how he treated his own wife and kids,” Mom said, “but he’s not buried next to them, which should tell you something.”
In fact, after his mother died, Hermann personally embalmed her and then in grief committed suicide through arsenic
poisoning, leaving strict instructions to be embalmed himself and buried with her in a double-wide coffin he had commissioned. His widow followed his instructions, then promptly moved in with one of her sons, Peter, who was a mink farmer.
While my mother told me all of this, it made her so anxious she had to take breaks. She’d stand up and walk over to the front door of the church and open it.
“It’s a little stale in here,” she said. “Some sun and fresh air will do it good.”
She was always in favor of fresh air.
“Yes,” I replied, and took a deep breath. What was good for her was good for me. “Do you want something to drink?” I asked. She liked fresh water, too.
She took a deep breath at the door and then returned to the pew. “I better keep talking,” she said as I handed her a bottle of water. “Or we’ll be here all night.”
Peter Rumbaugh—father of Ab and Dolph—was very successful at breeding minks for their most in-demand millinery traits: fur length, color, luster, and strength. Peter knew of Mendel’s early genetic experiments with crossbreeding peas and used the same selective breeding techniques to breed superior minks. He and his robust wife of Nordic descent had twelve children, the last two of which were the Twins. Peter was very proud of his family—a family that had never suffered a death during childbirth, or from any disease, including the
great worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–19, which ended many lives around here.
In 1921 Mr. Rumbaugh took his entire family to the Westmoreland County Fair. He belonged to the American Animal Breeders Association, and they were sponsoring a new exhibit for the recently founded American Eugenics and Health Society.
The idea of eugenics, my mother explained, was put forward by Sir Francis Galton, who was a cousin to Charles Darwin. In 1865 Galton introduced the theory that all great civilizations could base their success upon superior genes and that all undercivilized cultures had inferior genes. Naturally he concluded that Nordic and Aryan genes were paramount.
The Eugenics Research Association was located in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, run by Charles Benedict Davenport, and funded by the Carnegie Foundation for Experimental Evolution. Mr. Rumbaugh, already familiar with commonsense genetics through mink breeding, was immediately drawn to the ERA position that there was a biological basis for the Superior Family. He had read Madison Grant’s vastly successful book, The Passing of the Great Race, which was serialized in the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, and had memorized passages that he found especially relevant, and he quoted Grant’s dictum that “the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu, and the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; and a cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” As far as anyone knew,
Mr. Rumbaugh had never seen a Hindu, a Negro, or a Jew in Mount Pleasant.
The eugenics booth at the county fair sponsored a Fitter Family contest. Each family that applied was charted for tuberculosis, delirium tremens, syphilis, hair color, eye color, skin pigmentation, mental traits, epilepsy, diabetes, and financial status as well as alcoholism, criminal behavior, sexual misconduct, and religious beliefs. The final test was administered by a nurse who used a pair of steel calipers to measure their cranium size, since it was commonly believed that the inferior races had smaller heads and, as a result, smaller brains.
After all the families were interviewed and their “Human Stock” pedigrees charted and craniums scientifically navigated, the Rumbaugh family received the gold medal at the fair for superior genetics. The medal showed a young child reaching up toward his loving parents. Around the outer face of the medal it read, “Yea, I Have a Goodly Heritage”—this of course being the same Fitter Family medal that I had seen every day in the pharmacy. I loved that medal. When no one was looking I used to wear it around my neck as if I’d won the Rumbaugh gold medal at the Olympics.
Mr. Rumbaugh was also delighted with his gold medal and immediately joined the Eugenics Research Association. He was just in time to travel to New York City and attend the Second International Congress of Eugenics. When he returned home, he boasted not only of meeting the highly honored Madison Grant but of traveling to the New York Zoological
Park, where Grant was a founding member and responsible for keeping a genuine African Pygmy locked up on display. Peter bragged that he even fed the Pygmy a banana.
One of the ERA’s weaknesses was in the area of scientific proof that Nordic and Aryan genes were superior to all others. They could point to the great European races and their advanced cultures and civilizations, and they could list an honor roll of American and European captains of industry, soldiers, scholars, and presidents, but they could never entirely convince the truly objective scientists, who were more inclined to form opinions on the “nature versus nurture” argument around hard facts rather than racial features and “dummy Darwinism.”
The ERA was pretty eager to gather scientific proof that eugenics was an indisputable science which isolated and labeled factors that would predict refined personal habits, greater intelligence, and social respectability. All their charts and graphs of how superior hereditary traits stayed within race lines were dismissed as mere speculation by scientists who looked more toward environmental conditions to mold behavior. This is why the study of twins was chosen as the perfect way to gather proof for the eugenics cause. With twins the ERA would show the world that it was bloodlines and not the environment that made the man. And so Peter entered into a secret agreement with the ERA so they would become legal guardians for the Twins. One morning he sent his wife to Pittsburgh to purchase mink hats for samples, and while she was
gone he packed the Twins’ trunks, dressed them, kissed them, and instructed them to be brave little men, and then he escorted them to a car where a nurse and a eugenics officer waited.
“You will go down in history,” he told them. “Be proud of your heritage, and when I see you in twenty years you will rule the world.”
Naturally, the Twins were confused, but for the journey they had each other, and their bond was a barrier against fear. When Mrs. Rumbaugh returned from Pittsburgh on the streetcar, she was informed of the situation by Peter. She flew into a rage and vowed to get them back.
At about this time Mom turned and stared at the church door like a dog who knows well in advance when it is about to open.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, smiling at herself. “Thought I heard a car pulling up. Just making sure no Rumbaughs crash our party, if you know what I mean.”
I stood and looked out the window, but there was just the old Mercedes in the drive. “We’re okay,” I said.
She continued.
Things didn’t go well for the Twins. They were separated for the first time in their lives. Abner was sent to live with a wealthy Pittsburgh steel family in Sewickley, and Adolph moved in with an impoverished coal mining family down in
Uniontown. The Twins were fully observed, and the eugenicists hopefully theorized that both boys, no matter their social, family, and environmental circumstances, would rise to the top and thus prove that fitter genes made for superior humans. Nurses were assigned to keep charts on their health, table manners, vocabulary, schoolwork, and desire to be first in their class, first in sports, and more aggressive than other boys around them—especially those who were known to come from inferior Eastern European stock, Mexican mixed races, and Jewish families with less vital genes.
Mrs. Rumbaugh continued to search for them with great effort. She had inherited family money of her own and used it to hire the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency.
The Twins were four years old when taken away and nine years old when the detectives tracked them down. They forcibly captured the Twins and returned them to Mrs. Rumbaugh. Peter protested. The ERA tried to convince the courts that the children were legally under its care, but the judge ruled against the association. As for the adopting families, apparently the Twins were so forlorn and lifeless while separated, the families did not protest their leaving.
Mrs. Rumbaugh was so incensed with the father for turning them into a “farm and barn” experiment that she left him and Mount Pleasant and moved the Twins to Pittsburgh. They never saw their father again. Even mention of his name was forbidden. By then many of the Twins’ brothers and sisters had moved on, and as far as we know Mrs. Rumbaugh did
not encourage them to visit. In some hard way she must have blamed them, too.
By then Peter Rumbaugh’s own mother had moved in with him. He doted on her as a good son should. He bought her everything she desired. She also demanded that he never mention his wife’s name in front of her or have any relations with women again. He complied and slept on a narrow cot in her bedroom—a room that he personally lined entirely in panels of mink fur. She stayed in that room, in her bed, and he waited on her hand and foot.
When his mother died, Peter lined her coffin with mink as well. She had been a diabetic, and as her circulation declined she lost bits and pieces of limbs—toes at first, then fingers, and then a leg. He preserved her bits as if tanning a hide or taxiderming a specimen and kept the pieces in a case that was constructed like a velvet-lined musical instrument case, perfectly compartmentalized to secure the various physical discards.
While in Pittsburgh the Twins’ mother worked as a German language and literature teacher at a private high school. She joined the Friends of Germany Bund in Allegheny County as much to be around other Germans and German culture as to drum up business for her skill as an artisan of mourning jewelry, which she would weave from the hair of deceased loved ones. She also participated in the making of German folk costumes and helped organize German dances and welcoming committees for new immigrants from the Fatherland.
Many of the immigrants told her with concern of the new
Nazi theories on racial superiority and of the laws designed to “cleanse” the German population of unwanted genetic elements—mainly Jews, Gypsies, and mixed-race Communists. Although she agreed that good German boys should marry good German girls and have good German children, she had no interest in allowing the Twins to marry anyone. They belonged to her, and she was German enough.
And maybe, just maybe, my mother speculated, she had figured out the Rumbaugh curse and decided to put an end to it—to keep them from marrying and passing the curse to another generation.
To her credit, Mrs. Rumbaugh worked hard and eventually put the boys through college. They were bright and rigorously disciplined, and upon their mother’s suggestion became pharmacists. Once they graduated, the three moved back to Mount Pleasant, took a bank loan, and constructed the Rumbaugh Pharmacy Building on Main Street. The boys steadily nurtured the business, remained loyal to their mother, and like their father and grandfather, became interested in embalming, tanning, and taxidermy.
All those years, my mother said, their mother continued to dominate them, forbidding them to marry, or even date. The boys stayed in check, and she lived on. The only spot of trouble they got into was when they misjudged a prescription—sending a strong diuretic medication to a patient suffering from chronic diarrhea, which resulted in rapid dehydration and near death. The Twins were sued by the patient’s family,
but in court each Twin testified that he did not fill the prescription and that it must have been the other. Since one of them could not specifically be found guilty, they were both released.
“Believe me,” Mom said emphatically, “they would remember this testimony trick for later.”
She paused here and seemed to sink into herself for a rest, like a motor idling for a moment before taking off again.
While the Twins were growing up with their mother, she continued, it was found out that their father, Peter Rumbaugh, had traveled to Germany with a delegation of eugenics association members for a seminar at Frankfurt’s Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene. Dr. Otmar von Verschuer himself, a real Nazi thinker, delivered the seminar, accompanied by his assistant and former student Dr. Josef Mengele—the same Mengele who did all those horrid medical experiments on people in the death camps. When Peter returned to the United States, he even endorsed a petition presented to the mayor of Mount Pleasant that the poor be limited in the number of children they could produce while the rich were encouraged to breed more freely.
I must have appeared shocked, because Mom looked at me and said, “It’s even hard for me to imagine, but back then people were imagining a different world.”
Already the eugenics society had begun to influence the laws of the country at the highest level. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the majority decision for the forced sterilization of a “feebleminded” woman, Carrie Buck, wrote
that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This basically meant that sixty thousand “unfit” women who lived in poverty, or in ignorance, or who were mentally ill or just epileptic were sterilized across the country. Plus, immigration policy was influenced by which cultures were judged to have superior genes. Most were Europeans, of course—except for the Jews, who were limited in immigrating to the United States so were trapped in Germany to await Hitler’s Final Solution (Hitler is said to have called Grant’s Passing of the Great Race his “Bible”).
Years later, after the horrors of the death camps were exposed, some U.S. eugenicists were writing letters of recommendation for death camp scientists to come and teach at U.S. universities. It seems the Nazi scientists—especially Dr. Mengele, who specialized in twins—did a lot of research on hereditary traits. The eugenicists wanted his research conclusions to help advance their cause, but his scientific files disappeared after the war. That wasn’t all that disappeared. Of the 3,000 twins Dr. Mengele worked on, only 157 are known to have survived.
“It’s a bit ironic,” my mother said, as she finished up, “that a lot of Rumbaughs fought and died in both World Wars One and Two—American Germans fighting European Germans over racial superiority, when both countries shared many of the same race policies.”